Catalog

Trypps #6

"Part journey, part psychedelic flight of fancy, and all in all a purposeful break in rhythm, Ben Russell's latest 'trip,' Trypps #6 (Malobi), was a work of ecstatic ethnography. Clearly indebted to Jean Rouch's Les Maîtres fous, a midcentury document of West African Hauka mystics exorcising the demons of their colonial overlords, Russell allows his camera to fall into a similar hypnosis. At the beginning, he appears in front of his lead figure, the orange jumpsuit-clad Benjen standing in the doorframe of a hut, hastily snapping a miniature clapboard. The gesture elicited a few laughs, a token nod to conventional filmmaking in a determinedly unconventional setting. As the film progresses, Russell's camera loosely follows Benjen, who has put on a clown mask, and his similarly costumed companions as they make their way to the festival of death in the village center. In a single, weightless steadicam shot, Russell swings around trees and houses, circling around the main event instead of directly approaching it. While the villagers flurry themselves into an orgiastic danse macabre, which Russell joins only at the very end, his concentration leads elsewhere to the sustained revelation of unflinching vision itself."--Genevieve Yu, Reverse Shot

From the Maroon village of Malobi in Suriname, South America, this single-take film offers a strikingly contemporary take on a Jean Rouch classic. It's Halloween at the Equator, Andrei Tarkovsky for the jungle set. - BR